After playing around with cairo, I came up with an idea and base for a leetle system monitor for the hildon home. After some twiddling and finishing, it now works somehow and installs nicely. Thanks to hns and his post on ITT for getting me over the last hurdles to get the transparency working. The new project is dubbed mh-home-sysmon and currently supports only showing cpu load and memory usage. Warning: this is the very first release and may break things and most likely will drain your battery. Please report any bugs you find to maemo-hackers ticket system, wishes welcome too (select enhancement as ticket type). Installation easiest by using the .install link.

Been a while since I've blogged nor done anything maemo related. Well, for a change I whipped up a new version of osso-statusbar-cpu. I hadn't built it for chinook previously (although the code would have allowed that) and it was still looking like it belonged to OS2007. I whipped up a new base icon for it (based on the battery icon stretched to bigger square).

I'm not too happy how it turned out, but having approximately zero capabilities in graphics, I decided to let it slip as is. Here's a sneak peek of what it looks like:

As someone somewhere pointed out a long ago, the osso-xterm/vte show bold black as black, not as "bright black". I finally fixed this and new vte is now in repos for mistral, bora and chinook. Currently there's no way to pull this via UI (and OS2008 wouldn't allow it anyway) so if you want it, you need to use some apt-magic.

By popular request, mh-shot-tool now remembers the last selected method (save to disk vs. flickr) and the last save path. Also, an activity indicator was added for image saving/compression, uploading is still missing one though.

Keep your ideas coming, they just might get implemented. 😉

A small update for the lucky ones: mh-shot-tool is available for chinook. Just click on the install link.

A blog post suggested that mh-shot-tool should have the ability to snap timed screenshots. Trying not to let the audience down, I added a "re-grab with <n> second delay" functionality. Just refresh the catalogues and check for updates. Install file available as usual.

Piotras requested a php package with phpize and php-config, so I decided to change the packaging and add a -dev package. After a couple of tries I also added -pear and -cli package. I also upgraded to newest upstream (5.2.4) and the fastcgi-binary had changed name, so I needed to upgrade the packages once more. If you happened to hit this gap, upgrade the packages to get it working.

Had some spare time, so I upgraded the nginx package to newest upstream (0.5.32) too. Both packages available as .install files: nginx and php5.

The maemo-hackers website had been untouched for too long, so I decided to break it. First I upgraded trac to 0.10.4. This seemed to break the svn repeatedly, but quick googling suggested to change to fsfs-backend, and indeed, no more breakages.

Then I got and crazy idea, maybe akismet could be used to check tickets/comments for spam, like in wordpress. Seemed it wasn't so crazy after all, SpamFilter did just this (and more). Now I'm waiting for it to catch it's first spam!

Also, the few "lucky" ones with accounts, password changing is now possible from the "My account" -page.

I wanted to create a flickr uploading option for maemo-blog's future. After some struggling with flickr's API, I got image uploading work. For testing, I created a little application that takes a screenshot and uploads it onyo flickr. The result is mh-shot-tool, available for 770 and N800. As usual, .install is available.

Got a ticket asking for 256 color support for vte. Well, the ticket is now closed fixed and the latest vte in maemo-hackers.org repository supports this feature. No new osso-xterm release yet to pull in the lib, but with red-pill or apt-get you can get some more colours for yourself.